


TWO ELVES AND A LADY WALK INTO A TAPROOM

by spicyshimmy



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-09
Updated: 2011-12-09
Packaged: 2017-10-27 03:23:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/291098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spicyshimmy/pseuds/spicyshimmy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What happens after, from the perspective of three of Kirkwall's minor female characters: Athenril, Lady Elegant and Varania. Chaos makes for strange drinking fellows. <i>Athenril always knew the man she met on the Gallows docks wouldn’t stay the same forever. She’d given him a year, tops. Maybe two if it was a slow summer.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	TWO ELVES AND A LADY WALK INTO A TAPROOM

I.  
Athenril always knew the man she met on the Gallows docks wouldn’t stay the same forever. She’d given him a year, tops. Maybe two if it was a slow summer.

That was the thing about Kirkwall; the people were always changing. A lot of the time it was because the people were always dying, and there were few things—fewer than Athenril could count on the fingers of her right hand—to change a man like death. The ultimate change, even. The change they were all headed toward, to become just one more cracked skull in the sewers, just one more bloated body washed up on the sandstone, purse-strings already cut, clothes ruined for scavenge.

But all that was the kind of thinking reserved for a bad day, when hard-heads with more bone than brain thought they could pull one over on her, and made business _difficult_.

Whenever there was some kind of chaos—enough to distract the usual scum from trying and failing to cheat—it was a good day.

‘Yeah,’ Athenril said, observing the fire against the smoke, the way it was all pink like a virgin’s blush or a fresh swath of Orlesian silk just lifted from an honest merchant’s hull. She shielded her face from the hot blast, but she could see the whole thing mirrored across the water, and on the opposite side of that, columns of smoke and heat piercing straight up to the sky.

The foundations of the city shook; they’d been shaking for a long time. You got down low enough to the cobblestones and you could feel the whole thing breaking apart, and you learned fast how to predict a coming shit-storm.

By this point, she was practically an old salt. If she didn’t like Kirkwall so damn much, she might’ve considered piracy as a career change.

She wasn’t surprised when she learned Hawke had something to do with the whole thing. City crises often came with drinks on the house, and when someone told her she was full of shit—that there was no way she could’ve known from the start _the Champion_ had a hand in it—she wiped the whiskey off her mouth and rolled her eyes.

What the idiots in the City of Chains didn’t know would kill them someday.

As for Athenril, knowing was the same as living.

‘You don’t have to believe me,’ she said, and downed the rest of her free drink.

II.  
Elegant would be the first to tell you the title of lady was something you bought, not something you earned. ‘But the coin _does_ help, doesn’t it?’ she always asked, not exactly a question, and in amongst the polite laughter there was ever the spark of real amusement, so many people who would have been just as happy to be her as they were to gossip about her later.

Where she came from, what she did, and how she’d crawled her way up in the city streets—it wasn’t as though she’d killed an Arishok, she told Hawke once, and that seemed to make all the difference with _these_ people.

‘They’d still gossip, though,’ Hawke replied.

Bless him, but he thought it was the same.

If she’d been the one to do it, it would have been quieter, with a toast, something sweet slipped into the refreshments. A potion for this, a potion for that, and always a fine aftertaste; just because she was fancy now didn’t mean she’d compromise her standards, or change her recipes. She still told the same jokes at the parties and she still knew a good bargain when she saw one. She also knew the de Launcets had spent too much money on their dresses, and that Serendipity provided the only decent conversation to be had in Hightown.

‘Have anything to make this taste better?’ Serendipity liked to ask, holding a goblet of something red and not nearly too cheeky.

‘I’m a lady, not a miracle worker,’ Elegant regularly replied.

It was not uncommon—even for the not common—to observe the actions high above them and wish. Potions were wishes, wishes were dreams, and Elegant was in her house-dress when she saw it happen, screaming light bathing Kirkwall in its wake, not as bright as day, but not as black as night.

Say what you would about her city, but it always had _something_ to gossip about.

Elegant mixed herself a draught of elfroot to calm her nerves, then found her favorite pair of Antivan leather boots, the ones fashioned after what Orlesian chevaliers were currently wearing. She’d always appreciate the chiffarobe and the velvet curtains and the tasseled footstools, not to mention the new mixing station where an old study used to be, but it was times like these—so very _Kirkwall_ —that she appreciated the Hanged Man even more.

III.  
Varania should never have come to Kirkwall.

‘Actually,’ the elf in the taproom said, scooting over to make room for a well-dressed Hightown lady, ‘that’s what most people say about Kirkwall.’

‘I didn’t say anything,’ Varania told her. She’d needed the drink, and then she needed to get out of there.

But the place was stuffed to the windows with strangers who also happened to be chatty.

‘No,’ the elf agreed. ‘But you were thinking it, weren’t you?’

Blood magic wasn’t the only way to read someone’s mind. There were tells, obviously, and no one knew that better than a slave, whose only acceptable judgment was prediction, skills they never learned to unlearn. No one watched more closely than when they were in chains. No one saw more, or said less, or knew better.

Varania had to wonder if she’d traded that knowledge when she took up something more obvious. Staffs never went unnoticed, but slaves did.

The best observances were done in silence, but the elf on the other side of the table wasn’t the quiet type.

‘Athenril,’ she said. ‘Nothing personal. I just happen to like it when people remember my name.’

‘I don’t,’ Varania replied.

Maybe it was the place, and what had happened in it, the past she’d confronted—the hand that almost went straight through her heart. There were some memories not even magic could abolish, some choices no spell-wisp or Fade-spirit could condone. Temptation came from everywhere. And most of the time, it didn’t come from demons.

Leto had snapped after the same bargains, had wagered the same gamble, without the promises of mastery or promises, period; more than anything, Varania had done all this to tell him that, but confrontation never worked out the way it was supposed to. All her planned words failed her, the observances she’d made, the strength behind comparisons, _everything_.

Despite the betrayal and despite the anger and despite the little boy fear that twisted Leto’s mouth into some kind of nostalgia, Varania had known what Leto didn’t—that they were similar, with ambition more than blood to bind them.

And she hadn’t let him know it. He wasn’t ready to know. She felt affection and resentment, the same as always, like a child’s hand passing ghost-white through her ribs—which meant death and distance hadn’t mattered for shit in the end, and there wasn’t going to be closure, only shattered things bursting open.

And bad whiskey. There was a lot of that, too.

Varania and her brother had both sold pieces of themselves for power, pieces they hadn’t owned to begin with. She lifted her tankard, and Athenril tapped it with her own, followed by her fancy companion.

‘Now _that’s_ the spirit,’ she said.

 **END**


End file.
